Unlike English, which assigns gender lexically (e.g., 'boy', 'girl') or morphologically (e.g., 'emperor' vs 'empress') Spanish is a grammatically gendered language, in which every single noun (animate or inanimate) is grammatically marked as masculine or feminine.  Typically, the -o serves as the masculine gender morpheme (e.g., piso 'floor'), while the -a serves as the feminine gender morpheme (e.g., mesa 'table'). The masculine is used as both the masculine gender as well as the generic gender. Although the use of the masculine generic is still the norm in Spanish, its generic notion has been questioned in the empirical and theoretical literature. One of the most recent attempts at achieving gender-neutrality in Spanish has been the introduction of gender-inclusive morphemes. These gender-inclusive morphemes serve a double purpose: to serve as a gender-neutral generic that replaces the masculine generic, and to serve as a gender-neutral marker for someone who identifies outside the gender binary. Two of the most common gender-inclusive morphemes are -x (e.g., Latinx) and -e (e.g. Latine).  

Since, the processing of canonical grammatical gender recruits cognitive mechanisms, the addition of a sociolinguistically motivated gender-neutral category should also recruit cognitive mechanisms. Moreover, gender-inclusive morphemes do not occur in an abstract vacuum, they are socially motivated changes and person's opinion on them may depend on several extralinguistic factors such as attitudes, beliefs, gender identity, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc. Thus gender-inclusive morphemes provide psycholinguists with the unique opportunity of examining grammatical gender acquisition at the intersection of cognitive and social factors. 

Below, are some of the projects I have worked on that attempt to answer some of the issues raised above. They mainly use gender-inclusive morphemes as the object of sociolinguistic variation.  Others focus on understanding canonical grammatical gender processing in different types of bilinguals.